Spinoza Centre

To understand the human brain, it is essential to examine the living human brain.

MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) allows researchers to examine the living human brain with unprecedented detail. MRI technology is non-invasive and can be used routinely and repeatedly. MRI has already provided important new insights into brain structures, connections, function, and metabolism in healthy subjects and in patients suffering from a wide range of ophthalmic, neurological, and psychiatric diseases. The Spinoza Center for Neuroimaging is dedicated to supporting and expanding this research.

The Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging is a collaboration between the KNAW – Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, the Vrije University Amsterdam, and Amsterdam UMC. The Spinoza Centre offers its ultrasensitive MRI-scanners to more than four hundred researchers in the Amsterdam region for their fundamental research into the workings of the brain and brain disorders.

Research area

The research of the Spinoza Centre is focused on:

• Cognition (research into the brain’s information processing)
• Clinical science (research into clinical disorders)
• Methods (development of data acquisition and analyses techniques)

Imaging the brain

The Spinoza Centre houses one 3 Tesla scanner and one ultra high-field 7 Tesla MRI-scanner. The 7T MRI is one of the most powerful MRI scanners worldwide and the most powerful in Amsterdam. The 7T MRI scanner visualizes the brain at unprecedented high sensitivity, in terms of function, anatomy and metabolism in the living human brain.

The Spinoza Centre collaborates with several national and international research institutes and companies, for example the University Medical Centers of Leiden and Utrecht and Groningen

The Spinoza Centre has been supported in part by a grant from the European Fund for Regional Development (EFRO) and by contributions by the Municipality of Amsterdam and the Province of North Holland.